From John Nack's blog: "In the interest of giving customers guidance as early as possible, we have some news to share on this point: in addition to offering 32-bit-native versions for Mac OS X and 32-bit Windows, just as we do today, we plan to ship the next version of Photoshop as 64-bit-native for Windows 64-bit OSes only."

Well to be fair, Apple has been touting XCode for the last 8 years and wasn't shy about pushing developers to using them over CodeWarrior.

Xcode and CW are IDEs; Carbon and Cocoa are APIs. While you're correct that Apple have been pushing CW users to move to Xcode for a while, this has nothing to do with what APIs you use.

Not to mention the fact that they've been pushing developers to use Cocoa over Carbon,

For new development, sure. For existing applications, not so much. I think even Apple appreciate that tossing extremely mature, reliable and optimised codebases that work without extremely good reason is not a sensible way to run a business.

and after killing 64-bit Carbon last June, this should have been no surprise.

The surprise itself was that June announcement, which was a total 180-degree reversal of everything Apple had said and promised up until then. Don't forget that previous Leopards seeds were being shipped to Adobe and other developers with 64-bit Carbon GUI support already largely in place. I don't imagine the Carbon engineers were best pleased seeing a large chunk of their handiwork suddenly flushed down the drain either, but at least Apple was paying them to grin and bear it.

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To be fair to Apple, I doubt they made this decision lightly either. My guess is that with their OS teams spread increasingly thinly across expanding and divergent product lines (Mac, iPod, iPhone, etc.), there was a pressing need to reign in that workload ASAP, lest it get completely out of control (c.f. Copeland et al). I mean, I've no idea who the poor devil was that got to inform Jobs that Leopard would be six months late, but I bet they're still sponging him out of the carpet even now. No, not an easy decision at all.

None of this, however, is of any help or consolation to the unlucky recipients of last WWDC's surprise kick to the crotch. At the very least, a heartfelt "mea culpa" from Apple and straight-up explanation of why they had to make this move would have gone some way to lessening the bruise.

Apple may have learned a lot about shipping successful product since the bad old days of the early 90s, but they've still a lot to learn about building developer trust and relations. Treating third-party vendors as valued partners in expanding OS X into a major mass-market computing platform - not making them feel like unwanted irritants that may be swatted down at any moment - would be a good start.

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Apple may have learned a lot about shipping successful product since the bad old days of the early 90s, but they've still a lot to learn about building developer trust and relations. Treating third-party vendors as valued partners in expanding OS X into a major mass-market computing platform - not making them feel like unwanted irritants that may be swatted down at any moment - would be a good start.

Isn't that the truth. ADC relations people are sometimes very rude and policies change far too often.

It's nothing new either. In the 1980s and early 1990s, they were as bad. They're only truly nice to the Premier developers.